Category: Lead Management

Are you using Excel to track sales leads? 7 reasons why you should not

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7 reasons why using Excel to track sales leads is bad

Please don’t. Using Excel to track sales leads, that is. It’s a terrible idea.

Don’t get us wrong. I am one of those who have been quoted as saying, “In God we trust, rest must be backed up by Excel”. Among all the MS software that we use and we do use quite a few, this software from Microsoft is simply unparalleled in use, power and familiarity.

So, why aren’t we using Excel to track sales leads through the funnel?

Excel is free with your office 365 subscription, Saleswah is not. But, as we will see later, even that is not much of a factor. Here are a few things that Excel or Excel based lead trackers (see this, and this) just do not do.

1. Does not organize data in one place; or even link to data in multiple places.

You have a lead; that has a potential value, timeframe and associated contacts. You either will have an impossibly large and messed up spreadsheet or you will have to constantly refer to your email, PDA etc for information that proved difficult to capture in one place. If you know a excel based lead tracking software that does this well, let me know.

2. No time-stamped data capture

When you are monitoring sales activities, we need to understand things like how long an activity is overdue, when have we committed to do something, when is the next event and things like that. Getting Excel to capture that data is prone to error and requires massive efforts. And, as we will see later, prone to errors, data duplication and almost impossible to report on.

3. Welcome to data duplication.

Most of the stuff you will enter into your spreadsheet will be from information that exists elsewhere. So, you will send a quote elsewhere and copy down the value on your spreadsheet. You will have email addresses on your Outlook, mobile numbers on your phonebook/ cellphone and everytime you need to follow up on a deal, you leave your excel based lead tracker and jump into another software.

That is not how you do it in a CRM, obviously. You send a quote and it keeps the records, so even re-quoting is just a few clicks away. Your contact details are all in one place and you can keep them synced with G-Suite or Office 365. You can sync your calendar as well- and ensure no appointment is missed or no task is unattended.

4. No reporting capability:

Everytime you want a report, be prepared to spend time pivoting and massaging data. And, this is with basic “how much we will close this month?” kind of reports for single product, single market kind of companies. Excel templates for lead tracking just die when it comes to anything even a shade more complex.

5. No link, to anyone else or anything else

You have a team? Okay, then. Good luck with pulling all the data together and forecasting. Ever noticed how everyone has a different way of formatting data, inputting data or even abbreviations? And, even before we get to that, no sharing or collaboration on opportunities. No one knows what the other person in the team is doing. When a team member leaves, the data leaves too!

6. Complete absence of hierarchy in your data

You have a team, a hierarchy- reporting relationships. How do you share data on a need to know basis, strictly by hierarchy with your team members? How do they collaborate, escalate or even re-assign anything?

Such questions do not bother you when you are running your sales operations on Saleswah CRM. All customer data access is by hierarchy and bulletproof security guards it. Can you say the same about Excel?

7. Does Excel send you email or mobile triggers?

It does not; but Saleswah does. Everytime you create a sales lead or assign a task to your executive, he gets an alert on his browser, mobile app and also on email (what is task assignment, Excel will ask 😀 )

Enough said. Say goodbye to excel based lead management systems; get something much more professional and surprisingly, way more easy to use. Get your team on Saleswah.

Oh, and by the way, Excel is used for all spreadsheets- so basically, do not ever try to use any spreadsheet program to track your sales lead.

4 Lead management stages: capture assign nurture convert

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Sales lead management stages

Capture to assign to nurture to convert to deal

Understanding how a sales lead goes through all the lead management stages is crucial. Sales Leads – whether from marketing efforts or from Sales efforts, are the life-blood of a sales operation. The success of your business can depend on the number of leads you are able to convert. Your aim is not only to generate a bunch of leads but to ensure that they are assigned to an appropriate person for follow up and track conversion metrics.

Leads have a very limited life-span. Customer may not be looking at you alone but at other vendors as well. So, getting back promptly is important.

Typical lead management stages are

  1. Capture the lead
  2. Assign the lead
  3. Nurture the lead
  4. Convert (or reject) to a deal: wheare-upon further follow up might help win the deal.

We are today going to discuss the first two stages of leads management – the marketing lead and the sales lead.

Marketing lead management

Marketing leads are most often nothing more than a name and a contact number- phone or email.

More information is welcome, of course. But typically, we get nothing more than the bare minimum.

Capture: Where do you get leads from? Inbound calls, existing customers giving repeat business, website forms, email, seminars, referrals.

The main idea is to get a number and start calling them to qualify their interest. So, after the leads are “captured” in the CRM, it is imperative to get it to the right sales/ telesales person as quickly as possible.

Leads can be added to Saleswah one by one.They can be also uploaded from a spreadsheet.

lead management stages

 

See the diagram above for the lead management stages. It is obvious that at each stage we need to stop leakage and maximize the movement to the next stage. Having sound CRM processes can help you maximise capture, immediate assignment of all leads to the right sales person and putting in place a lead tracking and conversion process.
Yes, you can’t convert 100% of the leads. There will be a steep fall from “Nurture” stage to “Converted” stage. But, there is really no reason to accept “leakage” at any stage of the funnel before this.

Sales lead management in Saleswah CRM

Assignment: While adding/ uploading a new lead, Saleswah checks for a match with an existing contact, based on email address and if found, it attaches the lead to the Contact record. Now, this contact may already exist in the CRM but under a different Sales Exec. So, tough luck! The assignment will happen to the person who already has the Contact ownership (and thus Account ownership).

This could be tough for the guy entering the lead but good for the company for whom the executive works.

Nurture: After the lead is entered and assigned, the responsible user can then reject it (after recording a reason), re-assign it to someone else or work on it. She will then go through the lead follow up process, provide information and clarifications to ensure the prospect is interested.

Convert: If she finds it valuable and worthy of further follow up, she “Converts” the lead to a Deal. By default all Deals start off as a Sales Lead– the earliest stage in the funnel.

At this very early stage of the funnel, the accent is very much on trying to “qualify” the lead – find the genuineness of the interest, see if there is budget, start identifying the decision makers and the purchase process.

What are your lead management stages? At what stage do you have the maximum challenge? Take a trial run of Saleswah and check it out to solve your lead management challenges.

Sales lead management

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Lead management in Saleswah

Lead management is crucial. Sales Leads – whether from marketing efforts or from Sales efforts, are the life-blood of a sales operation.

Leads have a very limited life-span. Customer may not be looking at you alone but at other vendors as well. So, getting back promptly is important.

A typical lead follows the following stages through the sales process (before it is “closed”-hopefully as a win, of course):

Sales lead management 1

We are today going to discuss the first two stages of leads management – the marketing lead and the sales lead.

Marketing lead management

Marketing leads are most often nothing more than a name and a contact number- phone or email.

More information is welcome, of course. But typically, we get nothing more than the bare minimum.

The main idea is to get a number and start calling them to qualify their interest. So, after the leads are “captured” in the CRM, it is imperative to get it to the right sales/ telesales person as quickly as possible.

Leads can be added to Saleswah one by one.They can be also uploaded from a spreadsheet.

Lead management: assignment, conversion, rejection

While adding/ uploading we check for a match with an existing contact, based on email address and if found, we attach the lead to the Contact record. Now, this contact may already exist in the CRM but under a different Sales Exec. So, tough luck! The assignment will happen to the person who already has the Contact ownership (and thus Account ownership).

This could be tough for the guy entering the lead but good for the company for whom the executive works.

After the lead is entered and assigned, the responsible user can then reject it (after recording a reason), re-assign it to someone else or work on it. If she finds it valuable and worthy of further follow up, she “Converts” the lead to a Deal. By default all Deals start off as a Sales Lead– the earliest stage in the funnel.

Sales lead management

At this very early stage of the funnel, the accent is very much on trying to “qualify” the lead – find the genuineness of the interest, see if there is budget, start identifying the decision makers and the purchase process.

What makes a sales lead valuable?

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A case for valuable sales leads

Sales folks are rarely enthusiastic about sales leads- which is surprising, or not- depending on how you look at it. There is obviously pressure to get to an opportunity before your competition. But, the worst thing for a sales guy is to have to chase dud leads. What are valuable sales leads?

Leads come in all shapes and from all sorts of sources. Most of them have little information other than a name and a number. Some have an email. And most of them result in nothing. Reasons are too numerous to go into, here.

Lead generation to qualification

Leads to deals to winMarketing generates the most leads for sales. And those are the leads that sales people are the most sceptical about. So, over time, most marketing leads tend to go through at least a level of “qualification”- typically a telecaller who would call the lead and gauge the seriousness or interest in purchase.

The filtering tends to be quite severe. I have seen as much as 80% leads fall by the wayside and only the 20% or less make their way to sales people to follow up. These bunch have a much better chance of closure.

The goals of the telecaller and the sales guys are – even if slightly, misaligned. The Telecaller is the “man in the middle”- he filters the marketing leads. They differ in their understanding of what valuable sales leads are.

Valuable sales leads

The telecaller – typically- is looking to get the lead to commit to a meeting or follow up call – from the sales person. He counts his success as a number of leads who have managed to say yes. This, needless to say is what the marketing guy wants too. More marketing leads result into a follow up call, better his metrics look.

Now, if poor quality leads make into the sales funnel, the sales metrics of conversion will look bad. Which is why I say, the goals of telesales and sales are often misaligned.

On balance, I still prefer the marketing to fund the tele-qualification function. There is of course scope in sales and marketing teams sitting down together and drawing up pre-agreed crieteria for deals qualification.

Okay, so what are valuable sales leads?

Having talked with hundreds of customers in scores of industries – my only answer is that it depends. It varies from industry to industry and even within the same industry, it varies from company to company. And, I am talking of companies who have actually invested the time to define the threshold of information and interest and how they measure both before passing it on to a sales guy.

Interest in the next step

Interest shown by the lead in being contacted it seems is a big factor. Also, the nature of interest matters too. Some would simply want more information to be mailed, while the others might want a visit from a sales person. I know at least one company where professed interest in meeting a sales person is ruthlessly scrutinized because the sales people are so senior and their time, expensive.

Where telecallers inevitably falter

Almost all companies have a script for the their telecallers. But I have seen most falter in sifting through the tyre-kickers and the door-keepers. Sales does not like information gatherers- though in some B2B enterprise sales processes, information sharing is mandatory as part of a long sales process. Sales also wants to talk to decision makers- and most leads tend to be from folks who are merely gathering data for their bosses. You do not want to be at the mercy of people who are not able to represent your case in from of decision makers- though sometimes you may not have a choice.

Action, level and logical fit

Sales love leads where there is clear action plan and it is obviously set up at an appropriate decision making level at the customer place. If the lead is from a customer or industry segment which is a logical fit- that obviously helps. If it is not, the telecaller should try and establish the need or the pain-point of the lead.

To summarize, valuable sales leads are where meeting is set up at a decision making level where a logical product fit can be established.

Lastly, when you work on a common platform for lead capture, qualification, conversion to deal and deal nurture and close, it definitely makes it easier for all. The lead qualification is a learning process- over a period of time and by capturing data of hundreds of leads qualified – your own criteria for evaluating leads will get better.